Students’ Mistakes and Errors in English Writing: Implications for Pedagogy

Abstract

English writing in our academic setting has always been recognized as a certifying skill as students have to sit for examination and prove their competence by writing properly. However, the common tension affects each learner and teacher that the standard of English writing is declining as far as independent writing of students is concerned. English has been a compulsory subject from grade 1-12 with further emphasis on various skills at the undergraduate level that does not even guarantee any reasonable achievement in writing for majority of the students. The current study aimed at looking at a general standard of paragraph writing focusing on a very simple topic which is commonly practiced in the junior secondary level. For the study, 300 sample writings were collected from tertiary level students of 10 different institutions of the country. The findings reveal rather a bleak picture of student writing showing serious weaknesses in several areas from spelling mistakes as the highest number (n-573) to pronoun (n-19). In addition, sentence level mistakes also indicate a poor command of syntactic accuracy. Therefore, from this study, word and sentence level mistakes appear to be quite alarming underpinning innovative means of teaching to improve current state of student writing in English at their primary and secondary level. This issue equally deserves to be incorporated in various ELT training and pedagogic discourse so that teacher and learner awareness can be raised for effective classroom teaching and learning.